Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

Image of the Moon taken on Feb. 15, 2025 by ispace’s Resiloience lunar lander.
Image credit: ispace

Japan’s Resilience lunar lander completed a flyby of the Moon today, zipping within roughly 5,220miles (8,400 kilometers) of the Moon’s surface.

The commercial lunar lander is a product of ispace, a Moon exploration company.

“Resilience is now on a trajectory out to deep space before completing orbital maneuvers that will bring it back towards the Moon in advance of lunar orbit insertion,” stated ispace. “The date and time of the insertion maneuver have yet to be determined but are expected around early May.”

Image credit: ispace

Image credit: ispace

Packed with payloads

The lunar lander was launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on January 15 of this year, along with the now-Moon orbiting Firefly Blue Ghost mission.

Resilience is toting a number of commercial payloads:

• Water electrolyzer equipment
• A food production experiment
• Deep space radiation probe
• A commemorative alloy plate modeled after “Charter of the Universal Century”
• The Tenacious micro rover developed by ispace-Europe
• A “Moonhouse” designed by Swedish artist Mikael Genberg and mounted on the rover
• A memory disk that preserves linguistic and cultural diversity from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)

A “Moonhouse” designed by Swedish artist Mikael Genberg and mounted on the Tenacious micro rover.
Image credit: ispace

This is not the first lunar outing by ispace.

The ispace maiden mission of the company’s commercial lunar exploration program, known as HAKUTO-R, failed in April 2023 to land on the Moon, crashing onto the lunar terrain due to a navigation software failure.